Foot Pain

If your feet are size 9 or smaller, get out of here. I don’t want you to read this. I am cranky, I need sympathy and I’m not going to get it from you. Besides, you annoy me. You have always annoyed me.

Annoyed me because I have big feet. Really big feet. For an entire life I have gone to parties, to church, to socials and seen your tiny delicate little shoes lined up in the foyer. Man, they irritate me. So small. So exquisite. So dainty.

Disclosing a delicacy of foot that for a certainty is connected to modest limbs and diminutive stature. We may not be dancing today, but I know how your little feet look and act on the dance floor. Floating above the sheen of the floor rather than clomping around.

And when sprawled on beach sand, I’ve seen your small feet tread by, so close to my vision, right there, right in my face. Lithe, sexy, tanned and way too cute. Little feet, with painted nails, and flashing ankle bracelets prettily skipping past me.

When I see tiny shoes, I want to run, I want to hide. When I enter a house, I stash my shoes under the edge of a rug or behind the door. Too many times, some late arrival has yelled out from the entryway. “Whose monster shoes are these?”

And of course, some wit always replies. “Which shoes? Let me see.”

And so the shoes are brought into the front room amidst a large circle of individuals and passed about and examined. Is that not too much already? But then, you must know too, the shoes, though my best, look oh-so-shoddy. Because overly large feet stretch shoes, scuff shoes, warp shoes, and in general make the best pair of shoes age at 10x the rate of tiny feet.

And so, with little else to cheer me, I attempt to find comfort in that old adage my Mother so often cited to me. “I complained about my shoes until I met a man that had no feet.”

But the moral in the proverb is too pungent, even objectionable to my situation. Truth is, I don’t want my annoyance erased by this kind of wisdom. I want to dwell on it, and in dwelling on, learn to deal with it in a sportive way. Besides my Mother could well cite this with good humor—her feet were only size seven.

As for me, in my selfish and woe-begone-state, I cannot look at my feet with or without shoes and feel gratefulness. Not when everywhere I look there are tiny shoes and tiny feet on display. Small shoes couldn’t be more in my face if they rained down from the sky for an hour and a half every afternoon of every day.

Still I can’t help loving shoe stores. But I don’t go in them, at least not as a tourist. Like pet stores, there are too many lovely tiny shoes begging to go home with me, but like the tiniest and most vulnerable pets in a pet store, I cannot adopt them. There is no way I can give them consideration. Yet, I want them—though the thought be totally senseless.

But there they are. Top shelf, right in my face, a painful display of bright straps, delicate imports and exotic leathers meant only for others – not for me. I feel as depressed as a diabetic in a candy store, and if I inquire about a pair in size eleven, I always get the same response.

“We only have those Italian imports in Size 9.”

I want to slap them, but I don’t. It’s not their fault.
I wonder if it hurts very much, or if it bleeds terribly much, if one snips off their toes. And, I wonder too, how good life would be if I just had tiny, cute, totally sexy, delicate little feet.

It’s just not fair that others can get bigger busts, fatter lips, smaller noses, flatter stomachs, but I can’t get smaller feet. And that’s my ridiculous whine for today.

What this rant should tell you, is that life is as good as it gets, and I have little to complain about.

(Size 9 1/2, or larger, only need reply).